Word.ws English Dictionary

gone down the pan

gone down the pan is the past participle of go down the pan.

Meaning of go down the pan

Verb

go down the pan (third-person singular simple present goes down the pan, present participle going down the pan, simple past went down the pan, past participle gone down the pan)

  1. (UK, euphemistic, idiomatic) Synonym of go down the toilet: to fail; to degenerate rapidly.
    • The project would seriously go down the pan if Mrs. Foster weren't here to keep it on the straight and narrow.

Questions about gone down the pan

What is gone down the pan the past participle of?
Gone down the pan is the past participle of go down the pan.

Words near gone down the pan in the dictionary

  1. gone down south
  2. gone down swinging
  3. gone down that road
  4. gone down the drain
  5. gone down the khazi
  6. gone down the pan
  7. gone down the road
  8. gone down the toilet
  9. gone down the tube
  10. gone down the tubes
  11. gone down the wrong pipe

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gone down the pan (page history and authors); go down the pan (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “gone down the pan.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gone_down_the_pan. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.